One, I am a hopeless romantic. I fall in love with the love story of Fanny Brawne and John Keats, and I cry my heart out for the difficulty of their situation...

Two, I love the words that pervade the movie. I am mesmerized by the interweaving of Keats poems with the story. Oh, the idea of living a life so full of such descriptive and beautiful words... the images it inspires in my mind is just so heady... and the movie just reinforces it.

Three, I dream of having a garden like the house in the film has one day. I dream of having a garden that is magnificent no matter the season... The grounds around the house were awe inspiring for lovers of gardens that follow Gertrude Jekyll's sense of garden design. The scene from the movie that gets all the attention is the one with Fanny reading a letter from Keats in a field of blue bells... as lovely and romantic as this scene is, it is the fleeting scene of the lawn in bloom with daffodils that captures my heart.

{a field of daffodils -- I could not find an image of the scene from the movie}

Oh, to have such a introduction to spring and all the joys it brings... and to have the ability to express my thoughts with such a gathering of words that inspire so many images...

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.

His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot”albeit a perfect one”to get an “A”.

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work”and learning from their mistakes”the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.